Friday, May 6, 2011

Garden State craft brewers pick up another sponsor for legislation to ease regulations regarding their industry.

Bill A3969 was introduced in the Assembly on Friday by Craig J. Coughlin, a Democrat from Middlesex County, giving the measure bipartisan support.

Assemblyman Coughlin's 19th legislative district includes J.J. Bitting brewpub in Woodbridge, one of Middlesex County's three brewery-restaurants.

The Assembly bill is identical to the version introduced in the state Senate on Tuesday by Tom Kean Jr., a Republican from Union County. Sen. Kean's 21st District includes Trap Rock brewpub in Berkeley Heights and production brewery Climax Brewing in Roselle Park.

The text of the bills remains to be posted on the Legislature's website. But the brief description of the legislation says it "increases production limitations and revises privileges of limited and restricted breweries." (In New Jersey, limited brewery licenses are held by production breweries; restricted brewery licenses are held by brewpubs.)

The measures introduced this week were shaped by the Garden State Craft Brewers Guild.

But there are other craft brewing bills pending in the Legislature. S2040 and A3063 (identical to each other) propose to create a farm brewery/winery brewery license, while A3520 would allow craft brewers to directly retail to people who stop by their breweries.

With all that going on, it's no surprise to find pro brewers who are musicians away from the mash tun, and pro musicians who are brewers off stage.

Kyle Hollingsworth, keyboard player with The String Cheese Incident and his own Kyle Hollingsworth Band, is the music world's biggest ambassador to craft beer, brewing and homebrewing. String Cheese has nearly a dozen albums to its credit, while Kyle has a couple of solo albums under his belt, and now a nationally distributed craft pale ale, Hoopla, to his name. Not to mention a freshly made homebrew bubbling away in the basement of his Colorado home.

Both brews figure into Kyle's summer tour plans.

New Jersey's craft beer industry has two brewer-musicians: Bryan Baxter, a solo artist whose day job is turning out hefe and dunkel weizens and imperial pilsner for High Point Brewing in Butler and its Ramstein brand; and Chris Rakow, who's the guitarist for jam band Ludlow Station when he's not brewing tanks of Tripel Horse, Hop Hazard or Hop-A-Lot-Amus Double IPA for River Horse Brewing in Lambertville.

Bryan, 27, who just took Best in Show judging (for the Double Platinum Blonde hefe) at the Tap New York festival last weekend, sees loads of similarities between brewing and making music. (That's Bryan on the left in the photo.)

"Look at it side by side, the major beer (companies) are like the record companies. If you really want to get your record out there you have to go through the big guys," says Bryan, who homebrewed before landing a job with High Point and finished the first half of the Seibel brewing course. "Small craft beers are like the indie labels. The cool bands are the ones under ground; it's the same thing with craft beer."

Bryan's first disc, Simple Is Beautiful (available on iTunes), came out last summer; it's 10 compositions in the singer-songwriter/folk genre. On the album, Bryan sang and played acoustic guitar, banjo, lap steel guitar, mandolin and harmonica, and was backed by friends on keyboards and drums. (As a musician, he cites as influences Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Avett Brothers and Ryan Adams.)

"I've been in bands all my life. I never put out a full-length album because the bands would break up before we could do it," Bryan says.

His best chance at making an album was by going solo. "I got sick and tired of losing songs because the band broke up. I'm never gonna break up with myself," he says.

When he was gigging around (he's taking a break for a while), you could find him at the Court Tavern in New Brunswick, or at some basement shows in Brooklyn. Bryan has also played at Maxwell's in Hoboken, trodding a stage that has seen its share of big names (David Byrne, John Cale, The Pogues, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, to name a few).

Chris Rakow has been playing guitar for 16 of his 28 years; he homebrewed during his college days at Rutgers University, and has been running the brewing operations at River Horse for a year and a half. (An American Brewers Guild alum, he also put in some time working for Harpoon at its Vermont brewery).

With Ludlow Station, Chris continues to play with two friends from his middle school years, a time when he "learned every single Led Zepplin tune." The band released an album of eight original tunes last year, titling it simply Ludlow Station.

Brewing and music keep Chris busy.

"On our schedule coming up, we've got a gig every other week up until like July ... Old Bay in New Brunswick, it's a good beer bar, good music; Triumph in New Hope; there's this place, BBQ's, in Annandale; and Pearly Baker's, a nice beer bar in Easton, Pennsylvania," Chris says.

As for Ludlow Station's style, Chris notes, "We cover some Dead tunes, but I wouldn't say we're too much like the Dead. It's much more like jazz, funk, blues rock. Our instrumentals are more intricate because there's no singing. When we have a singer, we have a couple of originals, and when he's there we play some covers, like some Dead covers, Stevie Wonder covers."

Chris' influences are more expansive, however.

"I like John Scolfield a lot, his later stuff, his jazz stuff he played way back is good," Chris says. "I like mostly key players; I like Medeski, Martin and Wood a whole lot. They're kinda like my biggest influence. They're a jazz trio; they're just keyboard, bass and drum."

Speaking of keyboards, you'd probably have to scour the planet to find a musician other than Kyle Hollingsworth who has pondered brewing beer while performing.

"The music I play is very improvisational," Kyle begins, "start the set, get the boil started, then do first hop drop, run and do a jam for 45 minutes, do the second addition and then quickly play a five-minute song and do the third addition," he says.

Kyle laughs when he mentions the idea, but there's no question beer is a huge part of his life, brewing it and hosting festivals (Kyle's Brew Fest, done last year with breweries Great Divide and Deschutes, to name a couple).

"I've definitely spent a lot more energy on crafting my musicianship, and less spent on my beer. But it's always been there, and it's something I enjoy when I come home after a tour," he says.

"Part of my crusade over the last couple of years is I've been touring the country with my band and String Cheese, and I've been doing meet-and-greets and lots of other stuff at select breweries on the way ... from like down in San Diego, it was Stone. Then I went up to San Francisco, then I went up to Deschutes in Oregon, then down to Dogfish," Kyle says. "The vision was, for me, to connect the dots between music and beer."

Kyle's been a homebrewer for 24 of his 42 years, drawn to the craft by the chance to experiment and create something sensory, much like music. While on the road this summer, he'll be doing homebrewing seminars at festivals (like Summer Camp), bringing in tow an India pale ale he brewed just 10 or so days ago.

"I'm going to be like a 'brewru' ... we'll kinda explain the process and do some tastings, and hopefully get some people into brewing," Kyle, a professed hophead, says by phone from his home in Boulder.

That IPA he just made is the opposite of Hoopla, the brew he did with Boulder Beer that gets distributed nationally this month. "It's totally dry-hopped to the max. It's looking and tasting real good," he says, referring to the IPA.

"Over the last two years I've done a lot of different beers – mainly pilot type systems – in a lot of bigger breweries in the country. There's a great place called Avery here in Boulder; a local place called Mountain Sun (which did his Hoppingsworth IPA in 2009), there's a place called Upslope; Odell, I've done a pilot batch ...

"But this is the first time I've done a national, canned or bottled beer. So I'm very excited about that," he says.

With Hoopla, Kyle was thinking of Tennessee's Bonnaroo music festival.

"I went to Boulder Beer and sat down with their brewers and said, 'I want to make a beer that's a festival drinking beer.' Specifically, String Cheese is playing Bonnaroo this year, so I was thinking, 'What would you want to drink at Bonnaroo when it's 85 degrees, or 110 degrees, and 100 percent humidity?' I'm a huge hophead, so I wanted it to have some hops in it, but I wasn't quite ready to do the hop bomb at Bonnaroo," he says.

"So my vibe was to make it a pale that was a little hoppier than people expect – we were calling it a pale ale, but in my mind it's more of an IPA that's of a lower bitterness; it's not quite over the top. So it's an easy-drinking 5.7 (ABV), lightly hopped pale. The whole idea was to have something you can grab in your hand and go see 12 hours of music with, and keep drinking them, instead of one really strong beer for an hour."

And thus was born, Kyle jokes, a new style: FPA, Festival Pale Ale.

But in a pure sense, for Kyle, brewing and performing on stage are moments of creation, born in the alignment of intuition, impulse and passion that demand you make a decision.

Do you play a solo the way fans are used to hearing it, or follow the energy of the moment, the ongoing jam and the crowd's vibe, and take a chance by spicing that solo with something new? With brewing, do you follow your tried-and-true recipe and make the great brew you know, or take that recipe and play it a another way, adding some new ingredients that the moment at hand suggests?

"For me, it's all about taking a chance, all about taking that risk. That's the connection I'm seeing personally," Kyle says.

A new front has opened in the campaign to make New Jersey a friendlier place for the craft brewing industry.

Bill S2870, which "increases production limitations and revises privileges of limited and restricted breweries," was introduced in Trenton on Tuesday by state Sen. Tom Kean Jr. of Union County.

The Garden State Craft Brewers Guild, which has been working on the legislation for the past year, is now lining up sponsorship in the Assembly and expects a version to be introduced in that chamber by week's end.

Just exactly what the legislation seeks isn't immediately clear. The bill was just published, but the text hasn't been posted yet on the Legislature's website.

However, as it worked with a lobbyist to shape the bill, the guild's wish list has touched on raising the maximum amount of beer that could be brewed annually for both brewpubs and production breweries.

Additionally, the guild has wanted to let brewpub owners hold more than two licenses, let them brew for the taps at other establishments (i.e. restaurant-bars) that they may own, and in a bid to become more competitive with neighboring states, allow brewpubs to hold production brewery licenses for their locations, so they may sell beer off premises through distributors.

For production brewers, the guild has wanted to let them individually set up a clutch of salesrooms across the state for sampling and retailing to the public.

Remember, those items represent what has been a working wish list. Stay tuned for what the bill actually does propose.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Fans of Sly Fox Brewing look forward to the first Sunday in May and the annual Bock Fest's running of the goats in the parking lot of the brewery-restaurant.

This year, the 12th running of the ruminants, South Jersey's Barley Legal Homebrewers club ponied up an entry, hoping to land naming rights to the brewery's 2011 maibock. (The maibock is named after the victor.)

Alas, Toilet – the moniker the club's entry ran under – finished second in his heat, not good enough to make the finals.

That race turned out to be quite the David-and-Goliath tale: a three-legged goat named Peggy vanquished two-time champ Dax, winning the hearts of the crowd and naming rights to the bock. (That's Peggy's preliminary race pictured below.)

As for Toilet, it was a long ride home, but there's always next year. Maybe some Toilet Bock, too.

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What? Never Heard of Me?

I'm a freelance editor, writer, video producer, photographer, graphic artist and, obviously, a beer fan (homebrewer, too) ... I've even lent a hand at a commercial brewery in NJ (where else?!!??) and created some ads for a brewery that were published in Ale Street News and All About Beer.
My first taste of beer was a few sips of Falstaff at age 5 in 1965 (yes, I was drinking underage – in a simpler period of time, too). I continued to develop a taste for beer, but alas, poor Yorick, I left Shakespeare (and Falstaff) behind (but I did write about beer for my college composition 101 class, got an A on it, too).